Recently I’ve been contacted by one of Servage clients who found his sites hacked:

I noticed the anomalous traffic to domains that are essentially either completely parked or just used for email addresses (SMTP forwarding rather than anything ‘clever’ with webmail.) That led me to the file structures and a quick google led me to your site.

He sent me the offending files he found under his account (thanks Matthew). Now I can share my analysis of the files with you.Continue »»

This research is provoked by the following blogpost of Joshua Long where he lists domain names used by Koobface. Generally, I focus on website hacks and don’t research malware distributed via email spam and social networks (Koobface is an anagram of Facebook). However that list showed me how legitimate hacked sites were integrated into Koobface scheme and I decided to try to investigate how the whole thing worked.

Joshua’s list was a good starting point. I saw multiple rogue blogspot blogs that followed the same pattern and multiple compromised sites where those blogs redirected to. For some reason, most of the functionality of the malicious pages on the hacked sites is implemented as a client-side JavaScript, so I could easily retrieve and analyze those scripts. They provided me with very interesting details about the internals of the attack: sites it expected as referrers and usage of infected PCs. As a result I came up to the following scheme:Koobface attack flow and other details »»

As I tweeted a few days ago, I gathered a lot of interesting information about this case. So to make the post readable, I’ve broken it down into two parts. The first part is about how rogue blogs work, and the second part is about different generations of this black hat campaign and about the connection with Servage hosting provider.